Category Archives: documentary hypothesis

While tradition asserts that Moses was the author of the Torah (or Pentateuch), modern scholarship sees at least four different authors: JEDP. “J” stands for “Jahwist” or “Yahwist”, the author from the southern kingdom of Judah who prefers to write the Four Letters YHWH. “E” stands for “Elohist” and is from the northern kingdom of Israel. This author prefers the more generic Canaanite term for god “El” or “Elohim”. “D” stands for “Deuteronomist”; a reformist from king Josiah’s (or Josiah himself) court. “P” stands for “Priestly”, a writer who focuses on authentic priestly duties and lineage; sacrifices to YHWH or El could only be done by a priest from the tribe of Aaron, Moses’ brother. Thus any priestly duties occurring before the covenant on Sinai — like the enigmatic Melkitsedek (or Melchizedek) in Genesis 14 — would not have been written by P. There are actually arguments that Genesis 14 wasn’t written by any of the four streams due to the strange name. Melkitsedek can be liberally translated as “my righteous king”; Melkitsedek is both a king and a priest. This doesn’t happen in the history of Israel and Judah until Maccabean times (c. 150 BCE).

In P, only priests in the lineage of Aaron are people with access/communication to God. There are no angelic visitations, dreams, talking animals, or anything else like that. All the other sources include God communicating with people via these means. E and D both repeatedly refer to prophets and prophesy. Neither P nor J ever does (P uses the word once – metaphorically – to refer to Aaron himself). P never mentions judges – only allowing Aaronid priests to mediate. P also does not classify non-Aaronid Levites as priests, and only allows the Aaronids to have access to the Urim and Tummim. P only allows atonement for sins via sacrifices brought to Aaronid priests. In short, in P sources, the Aaronid priests and only the Aaronid priests have access to God. In D, on the other hand, all Levites are considered priests.

In P, as mentioned, the only contact with God is through priests. God never appears in person. He is never referred to as merciful or kind – indeed, the words “mercy”, “kindness”, “grace” and “repentance” are never used in P. The God described in P is implacable and all stories about him refer only to his wrath and justice; never to positive character traits. All the stories with positive (and more human) character traits of God are in J and E. In J, on the other hand, God makes frequent personal appearances. He walks in the garden in Eden, personally makes Adam and Eve’s clothes, personally closes the door of the Ark, and so on. In E as well, God wrestles with Jacob and appears personally to Moses. In P, on the other hand, God never makes a personal appearance.

J and P both refer to Mount Sinai repeatedly. E and D refer to it as Mount Horeb. There are no exceptions to this.

J and E range from 700-622 BCE, D to 622 BCE, P from 587-539 BCE, and the joining up done sometime around 450 BCE (although there is a good argument to suggest that tinkering with the text continued well into Hellenistic times). It is important to remember that nothing in the Torah (well… there are some poems like the Song of Miriam) is as old as Homer. These four authors also did not come from a vacuum, their theology was formed from pre-existing Canaanite theology and pantheon. Along with El (Elyon, or “El Most High”) and YHWH, the Canaanite pantheon included YHWH’s wife Asarah (or Asherah), Baal, Chemosh, Shalim, Shachar (“shachar” means “dawn”, and appears in Isaiah 14:12 [“dawn”]; the taunt song in Isaiah 14 is an old Canaanite song), and many others.

Basically, J and E were written independently, telling the same stories with slightly different emphases. At some point these were edited together into a single JE document. Some time after the writing of the first documents, a P document was written – telling the same stories but with a very different theological basis. Some time later still, a D document was written telling the more recent history of Judah and Israel, and claiming that they were once a unified kingdom, which fits with the period after the Assyrian conquest of Israel c. 720 BCE and the archaeological emergence of Judah due to Israelite refugees fleeing south. The tensions between the two nations before Assyrian conquest was apparent in such places as Isaiah 7:10-16. At some point after this, all four documents were edited together into a single document that became the Torah we know.

This might seem contrary to what’s taught in Sunday School, but just like most religions, there’s a separation between the religion practiced by the common people and the religion practiced by the priests. Analogous to modern times, there’s a huge gulf between the Christianity learned and taught by seminaries and Biblical scholars (“scholarly” Christianity) and the common person’s Christianity (“popular” Christianity). The same sociological context was extant in ancient Israel and Judah. Popular Judaism of ancient I&J was more polytheistic, acknowledging YHWH and his wife Asarah whereas the priestly Judaism of ancient I&J leaned more towards henotheism or monolatry. Of course, the priests controlled the texts since they were the ones writing them and eventually Priestly Judaism won out. Hence all of the Asarah bashing by D and P; archaeology shows a lot of veneration of Asarah by the common people.

If we look at all the J texts, they are consistent in that people started to call God YHWH right from the beginning (Gen 4:1 and Gen 4:26). The P and E texts, however, are both consistent in that people only started to call God YHWH when he revealed his name to Moses (Ex 6:2-3). Additionally, whilst the J author does call God Elohim, he only ever does this whilst narrating events – he never has a character refer to God as Elohim.

Multiple temples…

The letters from Elephantine show that both the Judean and Samaritan (capitol of the northern kingdom of Israel) temples coexisted. The Elephantine letters also strongly suggest that the holiday of passover was started during or after the Babylonian exile.

A recent carbon-dating of materials that come from a specifically locations in Israel (Megiddo K6 and Lachish VI — the numbers indicate strata) provides an uncalibrated dating range of 1194-1114 BCE. The Philistine pottery at those sites at those levels date early Philistine presence to that time. [I. Finkelstein & E. Piasetsky, “Radiocarbon Dating and Philistine Chronology”, Egypt and Levant XVII, ed M. Bietak, Vienna 2007]

A reading of Judges doesn’t know anything about the arrival of the Philistines on the Levantine coast. In fact, in Genesis the Philistines are already in the Levant at the time of Abraham and Isaac. The arrival of the Philistines was such a serious event in the area that soon after that time the Egyptians had lost control of the coastal area and later the uplands as well.

The bible knows nothing about the arrival of the Philistines, yet if a culture was there at the time they couldn’t miss such a presence. I’d have to conclude that there was no maintained tradition that reached back as far as the arrival of the Philistines, for if there had been, you’d expect the bang to be recorded. Instead, you have the local population (without sign of a recent arrival of its own) becoming aware of the Philistines as its awareness spread beyond its little world around Jerusalem and then the wider uplands area.

This suggests that this group of people as a cultural entity doesn’t go back as far as the arrival of the Philistines. (This seems to match the linguistic evidence that the Phoenicians were the earliest separation from the Canaanite group of languages and Hebrew was a later, more conservative split.)

We do not know the details of what Marcion’s gospel contained. Tertullian tells us that he writes from memory (his first draft was lost or stolen), and Marcion’s gospel was said to have been regularly being revised even after Marcion’s time. So by the time we are reading accounts of Irenaeus and Tertullian we cannot know what version of Marcion’s gospel they were reading. Nor can we know how much they were paraphrasing accurately from memory.

There must have been some overlap between Marcion's gospel and canonical Luke for Marcion's opponents after Justin to have thought it was canonical Luke he had mutilated. Most notably Luke is the only gospel containing that passage so central to Marcionism — the statement in Luke 6 about the 2 trees and fruit of good and evil.

[…]

Marcion's Alien (Top) God did not create the physical world, but left this to his subordinate Demiurge, the god of the Jewish bible. It is correct that the idea does not originate with Marcion — Marcion embraced it from well known philosophical speculations.

Loomis:

[…]

How are your Old Testament polytheism chops? Are you familiar with the notion that the God in the Old Testament is actually a conflation between Yahweh and the gods of the Canaanite pantheon?

This hypothesis asserts that the original god of Israel was a bull-god called El, and that Yahweh was considered a separate deity. – But that over time these two gods were combined to create one monotheistic god. It involves a divine family, and all kinds of gods and ‘Sons of God’.

I can’t help but wonder if Marcion’s theology is based on that knowledge, or at least based on some naïve screwed up misconstruction related to it. He wouldn’t have to invent a new god with a new son, he would only have to read the OT with a different slant.

Me:

Well this makes sense too… maybe Marcion simply read the LXX version of Deuteronomy 32:8-9 (and similar other places):

32:8 When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, When he separated the children of men, He set the bounds of the peoples according to the number of the sons of god.32:9 For Jehovah's portion is his people; Jacob is the lot of his inheritance

[The god] Jehovah received the tribe of the Jews from the Most High god. Jehovah gave the Jews their law and prophets and will give them their messiah, but the Most High god was a totally different god – and Jesus is the son of this Most High god, not the son of Jehovah.

Notice that this verse is corrected to remove the inherent polytheism and to reflect monotheism in current Bibles.

DG:

Just figure out who Melchizadek (sp?) was worshiping and you got it!

Loomis:

The one in Genesis 14 was a high priest of El [Elyon – i.e. the god most high]. He [Melchizedek] never heard of Yahweh. Genesis 14 is an old Canaanite story. The ‘Yahweh’ in verse 22 is a insertion. The entire chapter (14) is an insertion.

Melchizedek was the King of Salem – named after S[h]alim the god of dusk. Shalim was Shahar’s brother. They were both sons of El but Shahar was mothered by As[h]arah and Shalim was mothered by Anat.

DG:

Now, just for fun, whose god do Christians actually worship?

The Jewish God or Marcion's?

Me:

Marcion called the god of Jesus, god the father, the good god – the god of goodness. 1 John 8:4 (i.e. “god is love”) is closer to Marcionism than Judaism. There's nothing in Jewish scripture that says that YHWH is love. If anything, he's the god of justice — see Isaiah 30:18 — exactly what Marcion said he was.

Of course, I think that Marcionism was assimilated (along with Judaism) by the later Catholics so that we get the contradictory modern Christian god. A god who is both love and justice. Both all forgiving and jealous. One is Marcion’s god, the other is the Jewish god.

In truth, a layperson would be hard pressed to find a single real priest unable to name the four great streams of authorship behind the Torah’s sources: JEDP. And yet this knowledge simply does not find itself transmitted to the two groups that really matter: the great masses of religious people who have no detailed knowledge of religion and whose lives would be infinitely richer if they were freed from religion’s stupefying influence, and atheists who quite erroneously believe that a) owing to its mostly fictional nature, there is nothing inherently interesting in the Bible; b) feel that the way to counter a religious argument is to point out broad contradictions in the Bible without providing a concrete demonstration of how those contradictions arose and why they are useful in challenging faith

What he’s referring to here is what’s called the “Documentary Hypothesis”. That there were four main streams of thought/authors who wrote what ended up as the Pentateuch/Law/Torah. In other words, the first five books of the Hebrew bible supposedly authored by Moses.

“J” stands for “Jahwist” or “Yahwist”. These sections of the Torah are the sections that spell out the Tetragrammaton (Greek: four letters) or YHWH whenever referring to the god of Israel.

In this source God is called YHWH. Known as the tetragrammaton, scholars transliterate it as Yahweh (or as Jahweh, after the German spelling: Jahweh), and in earlier times as Jehovah. In most English translations of the Bible the tetragrammaton is replaced with the LORD. Note that the “w” sound in Yahweh is not present in modern Hebrew, as it was in earlier forms.

In J, YHWH is an anthropomorphic figure, fond of Edenic walks in the “cool of the evening,” killing animals so as to clothe Eve and Adam with their pelts, able to eat the food Abram offers Him, visible face-to-face (as in the theophany on Mt. Sinai, Ex. 24:10-11), and burying Moses with his own hands. YHWH can be reasoned with, as in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, where Abram haggles with YHWH over the fate of the cities. Similarly, during the exodus, YHWH. incensed by the Israelites, offers to destroy them all, and raise Moses’ descendants instead, but is dissuaded by Moses. YHWH then relented and did not bring on his people the disaster he had threatened(Exodus 32: 14).

YHWH does not correspond to the normative picture of a benign God in heaven; he can be dangerous, as when he attempts to kill his newly-chosen prophet Moses at the inn (see Zipporah at the inn), potentially malign, as in the story of the Binding of Isaac, or arbitrarily withholding, preventing Moses from entering Canaan without giving reasons.

J has a particular fascination for traditions concerning Judah, including those concerning its relationship with its neighbour Edom. J also supports Judah against Israel, for example suggesting that Israel acquired Shechem (its capital city) by massacring the inhabitants. J supports the priests descended from Aaron who were established in Jerusalem, the capital of Judah.

In attempting to identify the author of the Jahwist text, some orthodox Christians and Jews suggest that this original “core” of the Torah was written by Moses himself, and that the obviously post-schism pro-Judah material was added by the JE redactor to balance the pro-Israel material of the Elohist. This would put the origin of the original Jahwist text somewhere around 1300-1500 BC. This is not accepted by non-fundamentalist scholars, who on the basis of internal evidence date the Yahwist sources to the period in which the Aaronic priesthood was established and entrenched in their control over the Jerusalem temple, in the Monarchical period.

“E” stands for “Elohist”. These sections of the Torah are the sections that write “El” whenever referring to the god of Israel. Which might be more appropriate considering the name Israel.

In this source God’s name is always presented as Elohim until the revelation of God’s name to Moses, after which God is referred to as Yahweh. E treats God as a human-like figure, capable of regret, and appearing in person at events.

E has a particular fascination for traditions concerning biblical Israel and its heroes such as Joshua and Ephraim (a son of Joseph, and the tribe to which Israel’s king belonged). E supports Israel against Judah, in the case of Shechem claiming that it was purchased rather than won via a massacre.

E supports the Levitical priests of Shiloh (who were not descended from Aaron), who were not given authority in Israel, both against the new priesthood set up in Israel, and against the priesthood of Judah (which priests were descended from Aaron). E tries to show Aaron and his supporters in a bad light, for example via the story of the golden calf (which also happened to be the symbol of the new version of the religion set up in Israel).

“D” stands for “Deuteronomist”. This is obviously the author of Deuteronomy and all of the author’s type of thoughts sprinkled throughout the Torah. This author is rabidly monotheistic (or, the more accurate terminology would be either henotheistic or monolatrous). This author gives away his non-authentic agenda by the very name: deuteronomy, which is Greek for second laws.

In Deuteronomy, the Deuteronomist’s literary style is that of elegant flashback told by Moses, and so much of the narrative is scattered and disordered. Nevertheless, when put together in sequence, the narrative mostly parallels those of JE and the priestly source, though it begins only at the Ten Commandments. Since the narrative is presented as the recollections of Moses, it obviously cannot contain memories of events prior to him; but the narrative’s starting with the Ten Commandments (rather than with an earlier event in Moses’ life) may simply be a convenient literary device, serving to imply that that is the moment that things which are worth remembering began. The Deuteronomist generally exhibits a stance similar to those of the Jahwist and Elohist, so it may be that the Deuteronomist’s work was intended to be read in parallel with JE, rather than instead of it.

In contrast to the priestly source, the Deuteronomist cuts out the obviously pro-Aaronid tales, such as that of Aaron’s flowering staff and that of the appointment of the Levites, but includes the story of the Golden Calf, which is the main story from JE that casts Aaron in a negative light. Indeed, Aaron is cast even more negatively in the Deuteronomist version of the Golden Calf story. The Deuteronomist also emphasizes the negativity of the Golden Calf story by cutting out the tale of the Nehushtan (which would cast the idea of a cult object in a positive light) and that of the heresy of Peor (which would dilute the Golden Calf story by presenting another wickedness, one in which Aaron is not the villain).

However, like the priestly source, the Deuteronomist avoids stories that contrast even mildly with its laws; for example, the tale of food being found in the desert doesn’t involve sacrifice, and is cut. The tale of the non-Israelite prophet Balaam and the talking donkey is also cut, though this is most likely because it would appear out of place and disconnected from the main story.

“P” stands for “Priestly”. This represents the sections of the Torah that have the influence of the priestly-Levite class. Sprinkling their influence on texts found in pre-exilic Hebrew/Israelite/Judaite society.

This source is thought to have written the majority of the book of Leviticus, as well as stories that parallel those in J (the Jahwist text) and in E (the Elohist text), suggesting it was composed after J and E had been integrated into a JED proto-Torah.

P emphasizes the position of the priesthood and particularly of Aaron, and always presents Aaron as being present when Moses does something on God’s behalf. God works miracles through Aaron’s staff, rather than Moses’. P also denigrates Moses’ ability to continue to perform as leader by stating that, on descent from having become close to God at the mountain where he received the commandments, he was changed in such a way that no-one could bear to look at him. From the 1st century until the Renaissance, a misreading of a Hebrew word was responsible for the idea that the change included a pair of horns (see Moses for details). Michelangelo’s Moses is one example of this image.

Further denigration of the heroes of the non-Aaronid priesthood occurs in P’s treatment of Nadab and Abihu, who in J are described as being taken, with Moses, to meet God in person. In P, contrastingly, Nadab and Abihu are condemned for offering strange fire, and destroyed by God.

P is notable for its repetition of lists, long, unexciting, interruptions to the narrative, cold unemotional descriptions, and the lack of a high literary standard. While P uses Elohim and El Shaddai as names of God, unlike the Elohist, P treats God as transcendental, and distant, acting only through priests, and communicating only via the priesthood. In P, while God is just, God is also unmerciful, and applies brutal, and abrupt, punishment when laws are broken, such as killing 12,000 people with an instant plague, merely because they complained. P is regarded by the majority of scholars as particularly inelegant, and most think themselves able to recognize a text from P on sight due to this.

These are the four strands of thought running throughout the Torah. All of this was haphazardly edited and compiled upon the return from the exile by Judean/Persian “elites”, in which Ezra was more than likely a member (and possibly Jeremiah).

The expectation that the Judahite theology was fully formed prior to Babylon, and did not alter significantly through the experience of alienation and exile, is the one that stretches credulity.

In any other social science, such a transformative experience would be immediately tapped for clues as to how it changed the philosophy and outlook of the peoples who underwent such a struggle, whether it’s South Africans under Apartheid, or Jews after the Holocaust, or Cambodians coming to terms with a genocide, or Japanese coming to terms with their loss in the Second World War. But the exceptionalism required of a theory of a fully-constructed pre-Exilic J,D,P is really the one that beggars belief. Aside from the logistical hurdle of carting hundreds of sacred xenophobic nationalist texts into exile and then a second exile and back again…

“alright you, you’re off to exile.”

“Hang on a second — let me grab a few dozen scrolls.”

(Slash, stab.)

“And you, do you want to bring any scrolls, hmm?… Good. Off to exile.”